Truth and Goodness in Immanuel Kant and St. Thomas Aquinas

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Recommended: Short note on the nature of truth

Immanuel Kant and St. Thomas Aquinas account for the existence of truth in sharply contrasting ways. Kant locates all truth inside the mind, as a pure product of reason, operating by means of rational categories. Although Kant acknowledges that all knowledge originates in the intuition of the senses, the intelligibility of sense experience he attributes to innate forms of apperception and to categories inherent to the mind. The innate categories shape the “phenomena” of sensible being, and Kant claims nothing can be known or proved about the “noumena,” the presumed world external to the mind.1 Aquinas agrees that all knowledge comes through the senses, but disagrees with Kant in arguing that categorical qualities do not originate in the mind but inhere in the objects themselves, either essentially (determinate of their mode of being) or accidentally (changeable without loss of essence by the object).2 Aquinas further agrees with Kant that all the knowledge derived from sense experience is knowledge of the essence of things only insofar as it is understood by reason, and thus sense experience is insufficient to constitute knowledge by itself.3 But Aquinas defines knowledge as conformity by the mind to things as they really are, and thus believes the external world is knowable by the mind, both in the essences of things (what they are) and in the act of being (that they are).4 Moreover, for Aquinas, entities are related to each other analogously according to their modes of being, since being is a quality that all existent things share. Thus, being in general is knowable systematically according to a language of existential analogy.5 Kant, in contrast, begins with the assumption that metaphysics is invalid as knowledge...

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25 Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Translated James W. Ellington, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 9.

26 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 842.

27 Immanuel Kant, Introduction to the Metaphysicsof Morals, IV, 24, quoted in Heinrich A. Rommen, The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), 89.

28 Immanuel Kant, The Philosophy of Law. An Exposition of the Fundamental Principles of Jurisprudence as the Science of Right, quoted in Rommen, 88.

29 Heinrich A. Rommen, The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), 119-121.

30 W. Norris Clarke, S.J., The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 12.

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